On 8/27/12, wintertime(a)netonecom.net <wintertime(a)netonecom.net> wrote:
Hi,
I was wondering if anyone knew how to find your Native American connection.
Finding the exact nature of a Native American connection that is
before 1850 is much tougher than after that, but is never easy as my
cousin with Native American ancestry said they married the women "out"
and both men and women "passed" as white to keep from getting killed.
My dad always told us that we have Native American in us but
haven't been
able to find a connection through family. My gggreat grandmother Mary
Austin Edwards Wiest was said to be Native American but have found no
proof her father was from England and her mother is a mystery as she died
when my gggreat mother was a young girl.
What you want to do for a paper trail is try to find others
researching their Native American Roots, and maybe you can find
someone who also has Mary Austin Edwards Wiest in their tree.
There are some lists and forums specializing in Native American
genealogy, those would be wise to get involved with.
If you know where Mary was born and her parents got married, you want
to try to find that marriage record and possibly a birth or
christening record. Depending on where they were married, it might
be too early to be in civil records and would have to be in church
records.
I do have a page showing free birth records resources for the USA, you
could try to see if you could find Mary's birth there. If you want to
skip the introduction, click on United States A-Z in the left menu
for a list of states.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~thecohens/birthindexes-...
But thought maybe someone would have an idea on finding our hertiage
of
Native American to prove or disapprove.
Yes, I do, I do not think you can prove it definitively unless you
find supporting records and interviews distant cousins may have done
decades ago. However, you might be able to get some mileage with DNA
testing. But if you decide to try that, it would be a really good
idea to ask the people who are on a DNA mailing list about the best
way to go, and what the chances are that Native American Heritage
would even show up in a DNA test.
Mitochondrial DNA if there are any direct line female descendants of
Mary (a daughter's daughter's daughter's daughter) could possibly show
you if Marys maternal line was indeed of that heritage, but I am not
an expert at that. I strongly urge you to join the DNA Newbie mailing
list at Rootsweb and ask your question there, to see if it would be
useful to test the mtDNA.
http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/other/DNA/DNA-NEWBIE.html
Then there has been a recent discussion about Native American heritage
showing up in autosomal testing or not showing up, I think that
people did not agree whether it would show anything useful or not.
But all this stuff is very expensive, best not to seriously consider
it unless fellow genealogists on the DNA lists concur that it would
show up.